Efficient Wind Speed Forecasting Using Discrete Wavelet Transform and Artificial Neural Networks

Electricity demand is globally increasing throughout the world, giving rise to many other renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy. Therefore, to efficiently manage grid-connected wind power farms, precise wind forecast is very useful and necessary. This paper seeks to find out the most appropriate discrete wavelet transform (DWT), combined with artificial neural networks (ANN), for wind speed forecasting. Wavelet decomposition is applied to obtain a smoothed wind speed signal for more accurate prediction through neural networks. Wind speed data of three cities from the northern Africa region are employed, namely Annaba, Sidi Bouzid and Tetouan located in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco respectively. The obtained simulation results show that the Daubechies wavelet db4 with 5level decomposition outperforms all other standard wavelets in terms of wind speed forecasting accuracy.